If she's not gaming, an integrated graphics card would serve just fine. They're impressively powerful these days. To give an idea, all Macbook Pros but the highest-end i7 use Intel's integrated graphics to push 2880x1800 pixels in their integrated displays, and people connect multiple additional mon...

I ran out there real quick (never been out there), keeping an eye on frame rates. With every single setting maxed including Tesselation, at 1920x1080 I was still at 25-30FPS until I got to some dumb undead bear stuck in a trap made of dream catchers, where I dropped to 15. Setting back to the Ultra ...

I couldn't sleep, so decided to take a look at TSW's performance - but not with my SLI'd GTX 760s. Instead, I poked around with my sister's GTX 750 Ti, in my typical gaming desktop (Intel i7 2600K, 16GB RAM, 240GB PNY SSD, at 2560x1440). The only time I could get 'lag' was when bringing up an area m...

You do not in any way need a $1000+ video card to play Secret World. If there's 'lag', you need to quantify what's lagging, where, and how. What sort framerates, at what settings and resolution? I'm willing to bet you're just running into poorly optimized areas with crap occlusion culling, or big ar...

A couple hundred pictures is only a couple hundred megs to a gigabyte or so. It'd easily fit on a Dropbox account, or any of the other cloud storage services, and you wouldn't have to worry about them keeping only reduced quality versions of the images like a lot of the image hosts do. Dropbox and t...

That was painful to read. But those chats turn into such a nightmare of stupidity anyway, anyone that wants to as an intelligent question is just going to get drowned out by people asking something posted a dozen times in the forums and answered 3 other times during the chat.

Yep... I'm annoyed by this. There are a pretty large number of broken images now that I go digging. I'm going to stop digging for now and get lunch... Well, at least they're files nobody's noticed for at least a year. Silver lining, right? Pretty sure on November 25th, 2011 I transferred files for C...

Hrm. The corruption is at least a month old, present in my oldest normal backup. Good news: Not an immediate and imminent failure. Bad news: Data loss. Crap. I probably have some old archives laying around somewhere, but I had actually cleaned up stray copies of data not too long ago. Let's hope I w...

I agree on the grouping thing - If it happened more reliably at lower levels/content tiers, I'd love to do the oddball stuff bored groups would get into. Or try to convince non-knight/wars to just go ahead and tank, I've got them covered. One of my most memorable MMO groups ever was an insane run in...

Then they'll eternally be 4 expansions of AA behind. And that's still, despite your cynicism, a manner of subscription and income along with a continued audience, a wider sustained playerbase that's capable of doing more than a Silver or Free player that doesn't do that, further adding value.

There are a few ways this will increase subscribership long term: From my interpretation of things, this will put Silver/Free players at 4000 or 5000AA, with their 1000AA cap. Want more AA, ever? Subscribe, or fork out 250SC per 100AA cap increase. That's $100ish? to get your cap raised to auto-gran...

I choose to look at the AA grant from the angle of just how absurd the AA grind is right now. I did a very quick calculation when I had hit the low 90s, figuring if I really cranked at it I might get 12 AA an hour - and I think at the time I was calculating with LOTD and/or XP potions, and at whatev...

Why would anyone want to halt leveling? And If I have already purchased this AA (because there was no other available AA to buy) do I get a refund? A big reason used to be Vox and Naggy punting you out over a certain level. Or the Project1999-types that pay SOE to play a game they don't actually wa...

I love that they're being so responsive and transparent in their approach here. I think they immediately learned from the subscriber SC reward announcement. Who would expect agility and quick adjustments from SOE, of all companies?

My biggest fear is this creates a bunch of new people running around at max level with a bunch of skills they don't even have hot buttoned. This was the fear I was trying to express earlier when we were having the discussion. It's taken practice, time, and yes, sometimes reading to really learn how...

I'm not terribly surprised by this, although if the reason truly was performance, I wish they'd have taken a different route (a follow-the-leader style pathing calculation, where the entire group uses the pathing calculation of one particular member of the group rather than calculating individually,...

What's being described is almost the exact opposite of what happens with World of Warcraft. The most recent WOW patch was in October, and was for bugfixes and a couple mini-pets. I'd probably compare what SOE is describing to what Guild Wars 2 does - actual storyline content and progression released...

That particular tablet's getting a bit old, at this point. For the price, it should be /much/ better, spec-wise. 1280x800 on that large of a screen is well behind the times, with even B&N's Nook HD+ 10 inch tablet being 1920x1080 and $150. The only standout feature of it is the stylus - if you're in...

The standard edition is only $30 with your standard first 30 days free, then a subscription after. You might want to watch some gameplay videos (make sure it's of A Realm Reborn, the re-launch of the game). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39j5v8jlndM - The cinematic used when the original 14 was shut...

I'm playing this right now. If you enjoy Final Fantasy games, you'll like this, most likely. If you played FFXI in particular, you'll probably like XIV. Like all games, especially MMOs, it's all subjective. It looks like endgame is pretty shallow right now (just hardmode versions of Ifrit, Garuda an...

Which JRPG? Regardless, I'd recommend the 360 controller. newegg.ca is probably your best bet for getting one in Canuckistan. NewEgg.ca search results. I favor wired peripherals, but wired or wireless is up to you. /goes back to FFXIV Edit: Derp, didn't see you linked to things! Considering Record o...